This Is the Night!

John 20:1-18

A (short) sermon

for the people of APLC

April 15, 2017

This is the night!  This is our Passover with Christ from bondage to freedom, 

from death to life!  Tonight is the heart of our celebration of the Three Days 

and the highpoint of the church year.  Without tonight, Lent, Advent, Epiphany, 

even Christmas…without tonight, none of the rest of it matters. Without 

tonight, our preaching is worthless, and our faith is in vain.

Tonight is the night when we listen to the stories of our ancestors in faith.  Tonight we have heard the main milestones of salvation.  We have heard how God creates life from chaos, how God saves God’s people time and again…and those stories are told in very different ways, but we see through them all that God is at work accomplishing the impossible for those who would believe.  In all of the stories, just when things look most bleak, most dire, most hopeless, God acts.  And God reveals Godself to us again…showing us that God’s true nature is that of liberator and chain-breaker and bondage-shaker and lover and friend.  God does the salvific thing, the healing thing, the liberating thing over and over in our stories of faith because God loves ALL of God’s people, and ALL people are God’s people.

Tonight is the night we arrive at the tomb to mourn the death of our teacher and friend, Jesus of Nazareth, but we find that he is not here.  He is risen.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

God forever bringing life from death.  God forever bringing healing to the world.  God forever making all things new.  God forever creating resurrection stories.  And even the Gospel lesson takes place in a garden…the story of the resurrection where death, the last enemy, is destroyed, takes place in a garden where God is inviting us to imagine an new Creation on the 8^th day…and inviting us into the creating, into the resurrection, into healing and hope for a world where all are free, forgiven, loved, and brought from death into life.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!   

with enormous gratitude for the authors of Sundays and Seasons as well as the Sermon Brainwave podcasters and especially for the pastors and bishop of the Southwestern Texas Synod who have listened and talked with me during these last three months about healing, death, and resurrection.  these thoughts are a collection from all those places.  thank you.